SPHINX: A Neo-Gothic Novel from Brazil, interesting artifact of transness' long history among humans

SPHINX: A Neo-Gothic Novel from Brazil
COELHO NETO (tr. Kim F. Olson; intro M. Elizabeth Ginway; afterword Jess Nevins)
Modern Language Association of America (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A work of supernatural fantasy that questions gender divisions

At his boardinghouse in Rio de Janeiro, the Englishman James Marian is seen as handsome but eccentric. Then another boarder learns Marian's a fusion of a female head and a male body, Marian is the creation of a surgeon with occult powers. Despite his wealth and mysterious abilities, Marian is unable to live fully as either a man or a woman, traveling the world in order to repress his sexual desire and withdraw from society.

Sphinx explores the binaries of science and magic, body and spirit, male and female, attraction and horror, presenting its sexually ambiguous protagonist with sympathy. Ornately descriptive, this 1908 neo-gothic novel exemplifies the era's taste for the sensual and the fantastic. With echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it stands as a classic of Brazilian science fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Like Frankenstein, I'd call this speculative fiction, and reserve "science fiction" and even "science fantasy" for tales from the Radium Age; I think this book is more ancestral to what we think of as SF than developmentally connected. I think your pleasure in the read will more lie in the context of its times and its author's life, than in its mannered nineteenth-century prose. Be certain to read the modern contextualization materials to get the best effect from the read.

It is very surprising to me that, over a hundred years ago, the topic of sex being a fluid construct was happening in public discussion. The suppression and repression of queer people of all stripes is a long-term project of the hateful exclusionary reactionaries in society. Put a name to something as a means of understanding it, and it also functions as a target. Well, there is not and has never been a tool that did not do double duty as a weapon.

James Marian is a character whose lineaments do not fit the world as it is. Marian's body and mind have been deliberately altered, as a kind of proof of concept in a modern interpretation, an experiment in the parlance of the times. The way the melding of a male with a female was accomplished is both surgical and mystical in its origin. That suits the time of its writing but feels...odd, a cheat...in the SF landscape of today. I encourage you to read this story as a meditation on the experience of transness, a concept barely formulated in 1908, and certainly not familiar to the reading public.

This is a read for the most curious among you. It has pleasures to offer; it is flawed in execution; it stands as proof there are no new thoughts among humans, if transness as an acquired physical state was conceptualized in 1908.

Binaries are rare in nature. Spectra are the norm. It's long past time to apply that knowledge of facts to humans as well as all other entities in nature.